In this final excerpt from our conversation in October 2022, Jonathan Gorard explains how ideas from Wolfram Physics can be applied in fields beyond physics, including biology, chemistry and mathematics.

He describes the concept of compositionality, and digs deeper into why the hypergraph is able to model so much of our universe.

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Jonathan Gorard

• Jonathan Gorard at The Wolfram Physics Project
• Jonathan Gorard on Twitter
• The Centre for Applied Compositionality
• The Wolfram Physics Project

Concepts mentioned by Jonathan:

• General Relativity
• Quantum Mechanics
• Causal graphs
• Space-like separation
• Multiway system
• Phase space
• Schrödinger equation
• Hilbert space
• Kronecker product
• Multicomputation
• Compositionality
• Applied category theory
• Symmetric monoidal category
• Partial differential equations
• Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory
• Universal Turing machine
• Computational universality
• Cellular automaton
• Ontology

People mentioned by Jonathan:

• Rudolph Carnap
• Vienna Circle

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery, founder of Open Web Mind

I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

You know who Stephen Wolfram is, right?

Whether you love him or, you know, don’t love him, there’s no denying that Stephen Wolfram has founded a host of fascinating projects... most of them named Wolfram-something-or-other.

What are all these Wolfram-branded projects?

Who is Stephen Wolfram?

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Some of the things Stephen Wolfram created:

• 1987 Wolfram Research
• 1988 Mathematica
• 2009 Wolfram Alpha
• 2014 Wolfram Language
• 2020 Wolfram Physics

not to mention:

• Wolfram Cloud
• Wolfram One
• Wolfram Notebooks
• Wolfram Player
• Wolfram Script
• Wolfram Engine
• Wolfram Foundation

More about Stephen Wolfram:

• Stephen Wolfram’s web site
• Timeline

Stephen Wolfram’s education:

• University of Oxford
• California Institute of Technology

Some of Stephen Wolfram’s special subjects:

• particle physics
• cellular automata

Some of Stephen Wolfram’s books:

• A New Kind Of Science
• A project to find the Fundamental Theory of Physics

Other people involved in the Wolfram Physics Project:

• Jonathan Gorard
• Max Piskunov

Reference:

• Wolfram Research now has over 800 employees

Image:

• Animation. 1200 iterations of the ‘Rule 110’ Automata by Mr. Heretic licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0

Some of my own projects:

• things made thinkable – visualization of nuclides – tap the binding energy button bottom right to show the binding energy per nucleon
• Open Web Mind – subscribe to the newsletter or YouTube channel for more on shared human intelligence

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery, founder of Open Web Mind

I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

The full article is here.

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

The Open Web Mind is a protocol for shared human intelligence, based on the knowledge hypergraph.

Take a look at this quick introduction for subscribers to The Last Theory, then jump to the 2-minute trailer on the new channel.

And if you haven’t done so already, make sure to subscribe to the new Open Web Mind channel, podcast and newsletter.

If you’re interested in Wolfram Physics, I think you’ll find Open Web Mind fascinating!

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery founder of Open Web Mind

I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

How big are electrons compared to the hypergraph?

Is one electron formed of 10 nodes, or 10100 nodes?

And if it’s 10100 nodes, might it prove impossible to simulate an electron on any computer we can possibly imagine?

When I asked Jonathan Gorard this question, he took us on a tour of the scales of the universe, from the Planck scale to the Hubble scale.

He revealed how the Wolfram Physics Project’s early estimate of the scale of the hypergraph was based on a tower of rickety assumptions.

And he explained how the Wolfram model might connect with particle physics regardless of the disparities of scale.

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Jonathan Gorard

• Jonathan Gorard at The Wolfram Physics Project
• Jonathan Gorard at Cardiff University
• Jonathan Gorard on Twitter
• The Centre for Applied Compositionality
• The Wolfram Physics Project

Concepts mentioned by Jonathan

• Planck scale
• Hubble scale
• General relativity
• Fluid mechanics
• Quantum mechanics
• Quantum Field Theory
• Scattering amplitudes

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery, founder of the Open Web Mind

I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

What if you’re inside a universe, and you want to measure the curvature of space?

It’s important because getting a measure of the curvature of the hypergraph takes us one step further in Jonathan Gorard’s derivation of General Relativity from Wolfram Physics.

Einstein’s equations relate the curvature of space to the presence of matter. So if we’re going to prove that Einstein’s equations follow from the Wolfram model, we’re going to need that measure of the curvature of the hypergraph.

Once again, a two-dimensional crab comes to the rescue, given us a way to measure the curvature of a universe from inside that universe.

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See Stephen Wolfram’s announcement, under Curvature in Space & Einstein’s Equations, also included as the introduction to his book A project to find the Fundamental Theory of Physics, page 20, for more on measuring the curvature of space

Concepts:

• Cosine power series expansion
• Polynomial regression analysis
• Ricci scalar curvature

—

The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery, founder of the Open Web Mind

I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

The full article is here.

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.

In this excerpt from my conversation with Jonathan Gorard, he proposes that particles in Wolfram Physics might be persistent topological obstructions in the hypergraph.

He starts with a toy model in which elementary particles are non-planar tangles moving and interacting in an otherwise planar hypergraph.

But he doesn’t stop there.

He explains that there’s an infinite variety of hypergraphs that give rise to such persistent topological obstructions.

These localized tangles behave in ways that look a lot like particle physics.

—

Jonathan Gorard

• Jonathan Gorard at The Wolfram Physics Project
• Jonathan Gorard at Cardiff University
• Jonathan Gorard on Twitter
• The Centre for Applied Compositionality
• The Wolfram Physics Project

Concepts mentioned by Jonathan

• Utility graph
• Kuratowski’s theorem
• Wagner’s theorem
• Complete graphs – including K_5
• Complete bipartite graphs – including K_3,3
• Robertson-Seymour Theorem
• Graph minor
• Forbidden minor characterization

Image:

• Feynman diagram Feynmann Diagram Gluon Radiation by Joel Holdsworth, public domain

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The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery, founder of the Open Web Mind

I release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch here.

Kootenay Village Ventures Inc.